Interview: Unpacking Corruption, With Stars Saffron Burrows and Toby Stephens

Following up on the massive, international success of Oslo, playwright J.T. Rogers and longtime director Bartlett Sher have turned to another socio-political subject for their newest theatrical collaboration at Lincoln Center Theater. Corruption, running through April 14 at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater, tells the story behind the 2011 phone-hacking scandal that upended British politics and almost brought Rupert Murdoch’s media empire down.

The David-and-Goliath story, which Rogers presents in customarily epic form, follows Parliament member Tom Watson as he takes on News of the World editor Rebekah Brooks, not only risking his career, but also his life, to expose the nefarious goings on. Taking on these two roles are esteemed actors Toby Stephens (who last collaborated with Rogers and Sher in the National Theatre production of Oslo) and Saffron Burrows, a film and tv regular making her New York stage debut.

Both Burrows and Stephens recognize the importance of this particular story — they lived it in their native England, after all — and also the controversy that could come with it. Here are excerpts from a recent coversation we had with them.

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Having lived through this case in real time, what was it like when you first read the play? At times it felt like watching a Shakespearean history play.
Toby Stephens: Bart and J.T. kept on comparing it to Shakespeare plays, and I always slightly wince when things are compared to Shakespeare. It’s like the history plays because it moves around so much; you’re suddenly in all these different locations and following different characters with disparate interests, and they’re politically and morally complex. In that regard, it’s true. We’re dealing with an incredibly complex story and the morality is very interesting. Tom Watson is slightly ambiguous in a sense: he’s done bad things in the past, but he is obsessed by bringing down this woman because he has been hurt by that machine.

Personally, I think it’s about time somebody wrote about this. It was such a massive story and there are so many different parts of this thing, and they were getting away with it. But everyone was so terrified of attacking them because then they would become a target themselves. So, it’s about time somebody wrote a play, but you understand the fear. An American writer can do this, but if you were a British playwright, you’d probably think twice, because they’re still very influential and powerful.

Saffron, your character, Rebekah Brooks, is obviously the “villain” of the piece. How did you find your way into that?
Saffron Burrows: It’s tricky terrain to navigate. Clearly, there are about four white cis men running the world right now, and I didn’t want it to just be that the woman’s the demon, you know? Because there’s a whole mechanism at play. In rehearsals, we talked about how this is a story about what happens when capitalism starts to eat itself and ravages society. The writing became more and more nuanced. J.T. refined and refined it, so there’s now a scene where it becomes evident that Rebekah, too, is part of an order of things. There’s some subtle stuff at play between her and her superior now, which helped me a lot because she too has her adversaries that she has to tackle.

Bart and J.T. have obviously worked together for decades now. As actors, what is it like to be welcomed into their collaboration? I know, Toby, you did Oslo in the West End.
Saffron: I was struck by how truly collaborative Bart and J.T. are. It’s a new play and it was evolving throughout the rehearsal period, and I loved that part of the process. They’ve got huge creative confidence about their own skills, which made it all the more collaborative. Members of our company would bring in stories and things they read, so it was evolving daily. It’s a lovely, exciting way to work.

Toby: Oslo, in a way, was an inherited play. The great people who did it in the Mitzi Newhouse handed it onto us and we got that script and did our own thing with it. One of the reasons I wanted to do Corruption was because it’s a new play, not yet another revival, and it’s about something that’s really important. It was very collaborative. It’s really exciting when you’re working on something that is still finding where it wants to go, as they figured out how to tell this incredibly complicated story in a way that not only an American audience will follow, but will draw their own parallels with. The Oslo experience was different because we got something they knew works. The interesting thing about this is that it’s not a particularly optimistic play. There are optimistic parts about it, in that it’s about people who are fighting against the system and care about that, but at the moment, the system is winning.

What do you think audiences in England would make of this play?
Toby: I really don’t know. I think it would be hugely controversial. There’s a huge amount of vested interest there in people who were part of that system and who are part of the story. Doing it here is almost safe, in a way, because you’re doing it in a different country.

Saffron: I had a friend come to opening who, not to name names, but she’d been hacked, and then she reminded me that I’d had someone go through my bins in the early 2000s, and then went to my grandmother’s house when my mom was walking my five-year-old brother to school. That was a bad period, but when my friend reminded me of the details I thought “Jesus.” I’m sure it happened to Toby, too. It’s absurd how low the bar was in terms of what you’d expect from “journalists” — journalists in quotes. So I agree, Toby, I think it would be very close to the bone in London. Some people who are in power now are depicted in the play, so it’s present-day, relevant, and powerful. It would be quite electric having it there.

Toby: I had a friend, he’s not even famous, he was just going out with somebody moderately successful and she was going through a divorce, and his father, who was 80, found these so-called journalists on their doorsteps saying “What do you say about your son?” It was deeply upsetting for him because dad was so confused by the whole thing. He didn’t understand why it was happening. That’s just a minor, minor case. This is a discussion that’s still going on. Doing it in London, in the heart of this whole system, I would imagine would be really, really chilling and scary, to some degree.